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In my last post, I talked about some major — and very exciting — changes going on at Mortgage Coach and I asked for your feedback. We received a great response, so I want to thank everyone who contributed. I read every comment personally.

I was glad to hear that Mortgage Coach Members want the new focus to be about increasing member value and we’re committed to doing that. The upcoming launch of our new website will feature community tools to help improve your business every day. • Idea Exchange - a weekly message board for members to interact with each other• Weekly Coaching Call every Tuesday at 9 a.m. PST• New Savage Insights Member Blog • Regular Insight from Leading Industry Experts.

Our non-member readers have expressed their appreciation for the value they get from Savage Insights and would like to continue benefiting from the community education and business growth that a public blog provides. For those reasons, I will continue to offer a new public blog which will include guest bloggers. If you are interested in writing a guest blog post, please email me your idea at dsavage@mortgagecoach.com.

We are planning to keep current blog posts available to all readers for the time being. However, all new case studies and audio/video interviews will be for Mortgage Coach Members only.

This is not the end of something, but rather, the beginning of a new relationship. I’m passionate about helping loan officers make more money, by selling more effectively and improve the quality of their customers’ lives. That has always been our mission and will continue in the future.

As always, I am open to suggestions and ideas, so if you have something you’d like to share, or a success story you’d like to tell, please share your ideas in the comments section of this blog – I really all of them daily.

We are in the process of making our website much more valuable to our Mortgage Coach members and this will require me to change my strategy with my blog www.savageinsights.com.

If you are a reader of my blog, I value your opinion and want to include your feedback in our decision on which direction to go with Savage Insights.

Here are the possible directions we are considering…

We will make Savage Insights a password protected free blog that will require a sign-in.

We will make Savage Insights a Mortgage Coach membership blog that will require you to be an MC member.

I will completely discontinue Savage Insights and focus all my attention on adding value to the Mortgage Coach Community and member-only site.

My most important goal is to provide our members with as much value possible – However I am still committed to educating the industry at the same time. I just need to pick my areas where I invest my time very carefully.

If you have an opinion and/or you value reading Savage Insights, please add your feedback and suggestions in the comments section below.

I will be making this decision at the end of the month and one thing for sure is that the content and direction of Savage Insights will change; the questions is how much.

“Mortgage Coach makes me think.” That’s what Tom Griffith of Eugene, Oregon said at the very beginning of this recorded conversation. When he first sat down with the couple he speaks of here, he wasn’t sure how he was going to help them. But he opened up a Total Cost Analysis report and began filling in the fields. He knew that by sticking with the process he had honed over time, the best solution would appear obvious. And it did.

PROBLEM/SOLUTION:This client was two years post bankruptcy. The husband had been self-employed for 12 months and had not yet earned any income. Then the unthinkable happened — the wife got laid off. Prior to that fateful day, they had received a large inheritance and decided to send $100,000 to their mortgage lender to pay down their principle, expecting their payments to go down automatically. They did not. They called the bank and requested lower payments. The bank refused. Here they were, highly illiquid, no income, no savings and a mortgage payment they couldn’t afford. They had heard Tom’s radio outreach program and decided to call. They didn’t know it then, but their luck was about to turn.

Due to their current credit situation, they had to do a no doc at 9-1/2% with less than 50% LTV to get the deal done. A 9-1/2% percent interest rate sounds illogical today. But in a side by side comparison with a 6-1/2% loan for someone with good credit, the difference over a three year period — at the time when they would be in a better financial position and could refinance again — was only $9,000, or $3,000 a year, and the lower rate would have only gotten them to their freedom point three quarters of a year earlier. Just 9 months! This information was a revelation. At this point, the conversation was no longer about the rate, but focused on what the loan could help them achieve.

In the end, they were able to take some money out of the house, pay off two car loans and a credit card, and put some of the money they gave away back into their own hands. It was the right transaction for them at the current time.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS CALL:

Tom shows you how to uncover a hidden opportunity that most loan officers would have missed;

He explains the right time to fill out a Total Cost Analysis report;

He shows how he easily takes the conversation away from rate and toward the freedom point;

He dollarizes the cost over 36 months to show the benefits; and

He details his best practices for sending out RateWatch.

Tom is doing well in today’s marketplace because of ideas like this. Other loan officers would have said let’s raise the loan amount and increase their liquidity and would have ended up with an unhappy disgruntled client that really didn’t feel good about their loan amount. Tom came up with a program that worked best for his client and then presented it in a way that they could digest it. Thanks to his creativity, Tom now has a new client and a new strategy in his arsenal of successful best practices.

The latest S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index report is out, and the results are not pretty. The report shows that housing prices dropped in 19 out of 20 metros for the year ended February 2008. Some markets are down as much as 20%.

Now that you’ve read it, forget about it, because, this doesn’t need be negative for you. As I’ve said many times before, loan officers who know how to change and focus on the opportunities aren’t necessarily going to suffer because of this trend. The most successful loan officers have enough business to keep them going and growing for the long term and even in today’s marketplace.

But I know many of you are worried about the short term and you need to act fast. So I’ve pulled together 5 strategies that can help you put out the fires of your day-to-day challenges and grow your business:

Acquire new referral partners and cultivate the ones you have. There’s nothing more important to your business than your referral partners. Focus an hour a day on building referral relationships. Call five financial planners, CPAs or Realtors every day. Set one on one meetings. Hold joint seminars for consumers. Follow up via email with short five-minute videos explaining how you can help them grow their business.

Manage your mortgages. You’ve probably got anywhere from 100 to 1,000 mortgages under management. Somewhere in that database is a goldmine of new business just waiting for you to pull it out. By managing your mortgages on a monthly basis through the RateWatch system, you’ll uncover dozens of hidden opportunities monthly.